By Danielle’s second day she was looking more stable, but still had many wires and various attachments. You can see in the photo how she is sporting a white hat – this was created by the NICU team to keep her head covered whilst it had all the brain scanning probes attached. She continued to have brain scans, but she passed a detailed one without showing any seizures. This was a good sign at the time.

As you can see in the photos she was also opening her eyes slightly. She was still heavily under the influence of morphine and the anti-seizure drugs, but it was great to see her grabbing hold of her Dad’s finger and responding to our voices. One of the consequences of her dramatic delivery was that they had to break her left arm – this was one of the final delivery options following the shoulder dystocia. The drugs were to keep her conformable after all her injuries.

On Danielle’s first day Liza gradually had wires removed but was still seriously ill. Both sets of grandparents had rushed to see both Danielle and Liza – it was excellent that they’d been able to visit within the first few hours. At the time, we didn’t even know if Danielle would survive that day. I went home briefly to collect a few items and was amazed to see a rainbow near to our house. Thought it was some form of good news, but I guess it was more because it there was rain and sunshine at the same time.

We were given lots of information about what had happened and it started to become clear how ill Danielle was. The consultants were very clear and direct – this, both Liza and I are certain, helped us from the start. It was horrible to find out more details but the situation was made clear from the start.

Liza was wheeled in again to the NICU area. This time she was able to get next to Danielle to really see her face – this was really kind of all the staff. Liza was told she could stay for 15 minutes as she was still under close monitoring. She actually stayed for just over two hours and this explains how both Liza and Danielle are getting observations in some of the photos.

Danielle, due to the ‘brain insult’ (to use the hospital’s terms) had probes all over her head where they were monitoring brain activity to check to seizures. There had been some overnight, but anti-seizure drugs had been given and nothing further was noticed. Danielle was already on a range of drugs and medicines. She was also undergoing a ‘cooling’ process – this was where they gradually cooled her entire body to a low temperature to give her internal organs, but especially her brain, the best chance of recovery. We were told at the time that other organs could recover, but any injury to the brain wouldn’t repair itself so the cooling process was an attempt to minimise damage and preserve what hadn’t been affected. As you can see from the photos, Danielle was covered with a whole range of wires and tubes but seemed comfortable and asleep.

These are photos taken of Danielle (and Liza’s) first difficult hours. Danielle was born at 18.40 and these photos were taken late into the night of 25th and 26th March. Despite Liza’s very poor condition (having lost 3.2 litres of blood), she was determined to be wheeled into the NICU to see our new daughter.

This post has been dated to the approximate chronology when the photos were actually taken